Writing and Daydreaming

Abstract

This chapter was conceived during an interdisciplinary psychological experiment, in which geographer Hazel Morrison asked participants to record and describe in face-to-face interviews their everyday experiences of mind wandering. Questions abound concerning the legitimacy of interviewee narratives when describing subjective experience, and the limits of language in achieving 'authentic' description. These concerns increase when looking at mind-wandering experiences, because of the absence of meta-cognition during periods of self-generated thought. Here, Hazel explores the tensions at play in twentieth-century discourses around the self, fantasy and expression.

Wandering Minds: Tracing Inner Worlds Through a Historical-Geographical Art Installation

“…Alongside this scientific research runs a seam of interpretive social scientific and humanities research on how mind wandering and daydreaming have been conceptualized and represented at different historical moments (e.g., Sutton 2010; Marcus 2014; Lemov 2015; Callard 2016; Morrison 2016, forthcoming). Although earlier psychoanalytic and literary influences are now largely studied by those in the humanities and social sciences—and have largely dropped out of current scientific research paradigms—we argue that the process of revisiting earlier approaches might afford greater possibility for renewed, dynamic understanding of human consciousness, and in particular that of the wandering mind (see also Callard, Smallwood, and Margulies 2012).…”